Email is one of the critical applications many businesses rely on. In addition to facilitating intra-company
communications, many small to medium businesses rely on email as a method of communicating directly with
customers, be it primary contact, confirmation of orders, support requests, or for other customer service
functions. Adding the inevitable personal use and an irritatingly massive spam load, email systems can
see a lot of use. It’s vital for business continuity to know that corporate email remains operational
and efficient 7x24.

The Dot Hill AssuredSAN 4824 is positioned in the market as a high performance hybrid storage system.
Upgradeable with a customer configurable number of solid state drives (SSD), a base-model all hard
disk drive (HDD) array can be enhanced to provide SSD read caching or an SSD performance tier to
accelerate array performance. Dot Hill commissioned Demartek to evaluate the AssuredSAN 4824 storage
array as backend storage for Microsoft Exchange Server, configured as might be deployed by a typical
small or medium sized business.

We ran Microsoft Exchange Jetstress 2013 on an all-HDD array as a baseline and again with SSD read
caching and performance tier upgrades to simulate the Microsoft Exchange I/O load and database I/O
patterns. We considered the Jetstress output reports along with Windows Perform data to evaluate the
suitability of the AssuredSAN 4824 in these three configurations for this purpose.

Evaluation Series: Dot Hill AssuredSAN 4824 Flash Upgrades

Recently Demartek evaluated the Dot Hill AssuredSAN 4824 with Flash Upgrades for different types of workloads.
The workloads tested and their results are available at these links: